People who can't operate a computer will somehow become gods at following instructions if someone calls "from Microsoft"

Yeah, Reagan functionally broke the system and every president and party since then has made tiny tweaks at best, this type of understaffing was common under Biden and Obama as well. Its just hit its breaking point.

Pretending this is a Trump only issue is covering for a whole lot of people who share the blame in addition to Trump.

I would say you are more than likely fine, malicious code does occasionally sneak into Debian distributed apps but you'll likely never encounter something that is outright fraudulent or a scam.

I agree with your second paragraph but I fail to see how the existing unused fields are somehow less dangerous or a "false equivalence" to a new unused DOB field which is significantly harder to use to deanonymize someone than their name, address, and phone number.

VM under TrueNAS

I'm not really sure you can argue birthdate is the thin edge of the spear when the standard Linux user database already had fields for location, email, phone number, and real name. None of which have been used for anything up to this point, and systemd-homed is not as widely used.

I probably should have said "may/could" sneak in, I forgot the xz incident didn't quite make it to Debian (but would have had it not been caught)

Nobody is forcing you to consume content on the internet, this is a laughable defense. You aren't forced by society or capitalism to watch YouTube.

I can respect the honesty that you just want shit for free at least lol

I can't stand people that try to pretend that they're taking a moral stand when they just don't want to pay people for the work they consume.